


Time After Time

by wowbright



Series: Glee Season 6 Episode Reactions [19]
Category: Glee
Genre: Episode Related, Episode: s06e08 A Wedding, Fluff, Fluff and Crack, M/M, Marriage, Same-Sex Marriage, Time Travel, Wedding Fluff, Wedding Night, Wedding Planning, Wedding Rings, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-17
Updated: 2015-03-17
Packaged: 2018-03-18 06:26:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3559469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wowbright/pseuds/wowbright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before Kurt and Blaine can get married, they need to travel back in time to take care of a few technicalities. Brittany is their guide. Reaction fic to <em>Glee</em> 6.08 “A Wedding” – I saw time travel all over that episode, so I decided to make it explicit. Also on <a href="http://wowbright.tumblr.com/post/113835062640/fic-time-after-time">tumblr</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time After Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JudeAraya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JudeAraya/gifts), [Nadia Creek (kurtcountertenor)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kurtcountertenor/gifts).



It’s all clapping and hugs in the bridal suite when Kurt and Blaine decide to go for it, until Blaine says, “Wait. We have the tuxes and the rings. But what about the marriage license? We still need a marriage license.”

Santana gets a sly look on her face.

“Oh God,” says Kurt. “You two impersonated us to get the license, didn’t you?”

“Pffft.” Santana rolls her eyes. As if I’d ever be caught dead with raspberry hair gel in my ‘do.”

“Then how did you get it?” Kurt says.

“We don’t have one, Brittany says cheerily.

“Wait,” says Blaine, his eyebrows furrowing into angry straight lines. “You want us to get married today, but you don’t want it to be legal? That is _not_ what we’ve been fighting for all these years.”

Brittany steps toward Blaine and pats him on the head. “Of course not, silly. We’re going to go get your certificate right now.”

“How?” Kurt says. “It’s the weekend. The county clerk’s office wouldn’t be open. And anyway, you’ve got a barn full of guests out there who expect a wedding in half an hour.”

“Time is relative, Brittany says. She grabs Kurt and Blaine’s hands. “Come on, we’re going on a little trip”

*

It’s not until they’re zooming through the time-space continuum that Kurt and Blaine realize Brittany was talking about time travel.

“This doesn’t look at all like it does on Doctor Who,” Blaine says as light moves past them at an inverse proportion to their speed.

They float through a solid wall, and then another, and then another, until Kurt loses count. He’s not even sure they’re walls. They might be glaciers, or planets, or even people. He feels very cold whenever they intersect. ”I think I’m going to throw up,” he says, and then does. The contents disappear into the space-time vacuum as soon as they leave his mouth.

*

They stop first at Kurt’s safety deposit box. Apparently time travel allows you to shrink to small enough a size to do that kind of thing. It smells like metal, paper, and the overwhelming acridness of ink. Brittany uses the LED light on her keychain to light the inside of the box. “Whoa,” Blaine says, staring at the pile of papers that reaches almost to the top of their heads. “I thought I was short before, but now I’m _really_ short.”

Fortunately, Kurt’s birth certificate is near the top of the pile and Brittany’s apparently done this sort of thing before, so they manage to slide it out without injury to anyone. Still, it’s 3 times as big as any of them even though it’s folded up, so it’s more than a little wieldy. Blaine helps Kurt carry it as they warp over to Blaine’s safe deposit box, and on the next warp they all return back to full size and arrive at the steps of the Adams County courthouse in Decatur, Indiana.

When they go to sign the paperwork, Kurt has to keep asking Blaine what the date is, and Blaine has to ask Brittany, and Brittany answers, “Whatever day you want it to be.”

Thankfully, the clerk has dealt with nervous wrecks before and helps them out. As Kurt writes the date on the form, he realizes that he is signing this nine days ago, when he and Blaine weren’t even back together yet. He wonders if part of him knew that their marriage was already underway the afternoon he ran to Blaine’s apartment. Maybe that’s why he felt so sure that it was the right thing to do.

“Now we’ll get your rings,” Brittany says.

“But Sue already got those for us,” Blaine says.

Brittany gives Blaine a look that is both patient and condescending. “You guys are the ones that picked them out,” she says. “Do you really think I’d let Sue pick out your wedding rings for you?”

*

Kurt and Blaine spend a long time talking about the kinds of wedding rings they want – though it may not be accurate to talk about conversations in terms of “time” given their present state of temporal limbo.

It turns out Blaine never returned Kurt’s engagement ring to Jan and Liz’s jewelry shop after they broke up, and they decide they want to do something with that – maybe melt it down to use as the foundation for their wedding bands? The rings would be a type of phoenix, like their relationship.

“Well don’t you boys look handsome,” says Jan when they walk into her store. She turns to Brittany: “I’ve sold a lot of wedding rings, but usually not on the day of the wedding. It’s a lovely dress for a lovely bride.”

“I’m always lovely,” Brittany says with a smile. “But we’re not here for me. We’re here for them.”

Blaine hands Jan the engagement ring. “Could you turn this into two wedding bands? I guess you’d have to add more platinum, but –”

“What kind of turnaround do you need?” Jan says. “The way you’re dressed, it doesn’t look like you’ve got much to spare.”

“We have all the time in the world,” says Brittany.

Blaine is about to give Jan his phone number when Brittany interrupts. “Give her Sue’s number. Remember? She’s picking them up.”

Kurt nods, then leans over the counter toward Jan. “Can Blaine and I have a word with you in private?”

Jan waves Liz over to watch the counter, then has Kurt and Blaine follow her into the back room. “What is it?”

Kurt looks sheepishly at his feet, aware of the strangeness of the question he’s about to ask. “There’s no way that someone could plant a tracker or a spy camera or anything like that in the rings once they’ve been made, is there?”

“Is that a request?” Jan says. “I’m not in the premarital counseling business, but if you two don’t trust each other enough without that sort of thing, maybe you’re not ready to get married quite yet.”

Blaine makes an agitated little “oh!” noise and shakes his head vigorously. “That’s not what he means. The lady who’s going to pick the rings up … she’s not exactly trustworthy. She has a history of planting microphones in places where people really shouldn’t put microphones.”

“Ah.” Jan looks relieved, as if this explanation makes so much more sense than the one she’d previously imagined. “Well, it would be hard to embed that kind of thing into the rings once they’re already made. But there’s always the problem of lookalikes.”

Kurt and Blaine frown in unison.

“But we can get around that by adding a design element that only you two know about,” Jan says. “Something that changes under certain lighting conditions, for example. You’d be surprised at what we can do these days.”

She lists the options for them and they come to surprisingly quick agreement on one they both like.

“I love it!” says Jan. “It will be so beautiful. And I’ll make sure this Sue person doesn’t know a thing about it.”

Kurt and Blaine hold hands as they walk back to the front of the shop to meet Brittany. Kurt can’t help but repeatedly rub the tip of his thumb over the bare skin of Blaine’s ring finger. He leans closer to Blaine and whispers, “Is it weird how much I’m looking forward to my ring being on your finger?”

Blaine turns to him, lips almost close enough to touch. “Not at all. I’ve wanted it there forever.”

*

Their next stop is New York City, June 2014. They land in an alleyway three blocks west of the blue line. It’s a few weeks after they broke up.

“Are we here to save our relationship?” Kurt asks.

“No,” Brittany says. “That’s already taken care of.”

“Then why are we here in June?” Blaine says.

“Because New York is pretty in June.” Brittany claps her hands together in glee. “And because you need to shop for your wedding jackets.”

Blaine’s about to point out that they have wedding jackets waiting for them in Indiana, but quickly figures out that the logic of the rings must apply here, too.

“That explains a lot,” Kurt mumbles to himself. Picking out a tuxedo jacket for Blaine wouldn’t have been too hard, since Brooks Brothers is always a good bet for him. But that they’d managed to find something Kurt would have picked out for himself – that was more bewildering than Brittany’s ability to time travel.

”Take all the time you need,” says Brittany. “We’ll get back before the ceremony no matter what.”

They go their separate ways for efficiency’s sake. Kurt squeezes Blaine’s hand for reassurance before they part. It’s weird, knowing that their past selves are elsewhere in the city, not even talking to each other.

Kurt has the urge to call Elliott to help him with the shopping, but past Kurt might very well be hanging out with Elliott and pouting over his own heartbreak at this very minute. So instead he calls Isabelle, who he hasn’t talked to since April. She won’t know anything about the break-up. It turns out that she’s both available and thrilled to help.

They stop in practically every men’s boutique in Manhattan, as well as the Vogue.com vault. Kurt carefully considers all his options, listing out all the pros and cons in a spreadsheet on his phone (which seems to be working remarkably well despite all the strange physics it has been through so far today). At the end of the day, the Dsquared2 black-on-black camo tuxedo jacket – the same one that was waiting for him in the bridal room – wins out. It really is perfect.

Blaine takes a lot less time to find his perfect fit. He heads over to Brooks Brothers with Brittany, finds an off-the-rack jacket that fans out over his butt just so (he wants to look perfect for his groom, and he knows what Kurt loves about his body), and asks them to ship it to Brittany’s house. Then he checks in with Kurt (“You didn’t really expect me to be done yet, did you, Blaine?”) and makes a call to June, who invites Blaine and Brittany to meet her for high tea at the Russian Tea Room.

It’s getting close to dusk when Blaine and Brittany say goodbye to June. A text from Kurt confirms that he’s still nowhere near done shopping, so Blaine and Brittany go to a movie theater to kill time. They opt for _X-Men: Days of Future Past_ , which Blaine totally missed on its first run because he was too depressed to do much of anything. As they wait for the trailers to begin, Blaine wonders momentarily if he should be trying to contact his old self, who is probably holed up in his bedroom right now and rapidly flunking out of NYADA. Perhaps the newer, wiser Blaine could shake the old Blaine out of his funk – or at least to tell him that things will get better, that there’s still lots of happiness yet to come even if it feels impossible right now, and that Kurt will never stop loving him.

But then Blaine thinks back on everything that’s happened since he returned to Lima, the whole messy journey of finding himself. He can’t think of a single thing he could subtract from that journey and still be where he is today, ready to marry the love of his life without fear.

So he sinks back into the seat, tucks several napkins over his tuxedo shirt, and starts in on the bucket of popcorn Brittany’s holding in her lap.

*

Kurt meets them outside the theater when the movie’s over. He looks so elegant in the artificial light of the streetlamp, his white bridesman’s jacket and his towering hair showing none of the wear they ought to be after such a long day.

Of course, those aren’t the things that make Blaine’s heart stop. No. It’s the moment that Kurt’s eyes meet Blaine’s, and Kurt’s face goes from merely happy to full of joy. “I missed you,” Kurt says. He holds out his hand and Blaine takes it.

Brittany gestures at them to follow her down the sidewalk. Unlike Ohio and Indiana, which have time portals every ten feet or so, here are only seven such portals in New York City. They need to walk to the subway and take the orange line to the purple line to get to the closest one.

“I missed you, too,” Blaine says. “I’ll have to take you to the Russian Tea Room sometime. You’d love it.”

“I _was_ a little jealous when I heard that’s where you guys would be spending your afternoon,” Kurt says. “But you know how I am about making decisions. Even if I already know what I’m going to decide, it feels better if I get to weigh everything a million times.”

The words fall heavy on Blaine’s ears, but he doesn’t say anything for a moment. He watches Brittany walking several strides ahead of them, her hair swinging side-to-side with each step. He watches the city moving around them, almost as fast as time.

Kurt squeezes Blaine’s hand. “You’re quiet. Lost in thought?”

“I was wondering –” Blaine hesitates. He’s afraid to say what he’s about to say. But if he’s learned anything over the past few months, it’s that times like these are when it’s most important to speak. “I was wondering if you’re ready to go back yet. I know how much you like planning things, and maybe – maybe getting married in such a rush is something you might regret later. Brittany says we have all the time in the world. So if you wanted, we could – maybe we could find a place to stay for a while and you could plan out the wedding in more detail.”

Kurt comes to a sudden stop. “You think that’s what the shopping was about? That I was trying to put off marrying you?”

“I wouldn’t have said it that way, but … maybe?”

Kurt shakes his head. The expression in his eyes is 25 percent sad and 75 percent affectionate. “Remember when I ran to your apartment to tell you I still love you?”

Blaine nods sheepishly. “It was only three weeks ago. Or …” He gestures toward the clock tower on a nearby church. “You know what I mean. Anyway, I don’t think I ever _could_ forget that. It’s the happiest day of my life so far.”

“That’s the moment I gave my heart to you, Blaine. Getting married is only confirmation of that.”

“Oh, I –” Blaine starts, but it’s hard to talk when Kurt’s looking at him like he’s the light of Kurt’s world.

“I know I’ve spent my whole life planning weddings. And I would have thought I’d want to plan my own, but … I don’t, really.” The corner of Kurt’s mouth curls up in a surprised shrug. “I mean, obviously it’s important to me to have a wedding jacket that I look amazing, but that’s mostly because I want to look amazing for _you_. Otherwise – it’s not the wedding that’s important to me anymore. It’s the marriage. And I can’t wait for our marriage to get started.”

There’s really no way for Blaine to respond other than to lean forward and kiss Kurt with every ounce of love in his body.

But Blaine only gets about a quarter-ounce of love past Kurt’s lips before they’re interrupted by Brittany’s voice. “Hey now! Do I need to find you two a room before the ceremony begins?”

Kurt and Blaine blush and shake their heads simultaneously. “We’re ready to get married.”

*

When they get back to Indiana, Kurt and Blaine are both so eager to start the ceremony that they forget to check their wedding rings for authenticity.

Blaine’s the first one to remember about it later that night after their second round of sex in their tiny Econo Lodge motel room. Kurt is half-sprawled over Blaine’s body, his ear pressed to Blaine’s heart. He reaches for Blaine’s left hand and brings it to his lips, kissing the wedding band.

“We forgot to check our rings,” Blaine says. The need to do so doesn’t feel urgent – if Sue’s been tracking them, she’s already heard just about everything – but he’s curious to see if their plan worked. He leans over to turn on the bedside lamp.

They both slip off their rings and hold them together under the light, When they turn them just so, a hologram appears on the inside of the joined bands: a yellow canary in flight.

Kurt grins. “Hello Pavarotti,” he whispers. “It’s nice to see you again.”

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes its title from the song “Time After Time,” which took its title from the time travel movie “Time After Time,” which loosely took its premise from the life of H.G. Wells, author of the science fiction classic “The Time Machine.” Unbeknownst to them, catyuy inspired Kurt’s paranoia about Sue putting spy devices in the rings, and januarium inspired his suspicions about being impersonated by the brides.


End file.
